As usual, there was one hanging about, this time asleep on a branch in one of the trees nearby; there always was at least one, still, although she had greatly feared they might desert her after the night-sylphs had accidentally caused the Hauptmann’s death on her orders. But how could I have done any different? she asked herself, as she always did. What he would have done to me . . .

She shook off the dark thoughts, and woke up the drowsy sylph with a thought. “Tante Gretchen would like to know what the weather will be for a while, please,” she asked, silently.

The sylph yawned, and blinked sleepily. “Rain tomorrow and the next day, fine again for at least three.”

“Thank you,” Giselle said, and the sylph yawned again and went back to sleeping on her sunny branch.

“Well, you may as well stay until the rain is over,” Tante Gretchen said, logically enough, when Giselle reported what the sylph had said. “I can use the help. And I’d like you to finish our book before you go.”

“And I will happily give it, and even more happily finish the book,” Giselle replied. Though as she finished shelling the peas, she tried not to think about the situation. She really did not want to be in the debt of the Bruderschaft—she was trying so hard to be independent, like Mother, and it felt like failure to have to come to them, proverbial cap in hand, in the very first year.

With rain pouring down as hard as Giselle had ever seen it, there was not much they could do but things that could be done indoors. Since the cottage was so small, and Tante Gretchen was meticulous about keeping it clean, it was less than two hours’ work to have everything scoured. Obviously you could not wash clothing when it was raining, nor bake, so that left handwork. Tante Gretchen pulled her favorite chair up to the fire, piled her mending in one basket on her left and had her knitting in a second basket on her right, while Giselle had a lantern over her shoulder and the Karl May book about Winnetou she had promised to finish in her hands.